An Alaskan journalist's perspective on local and national issues

Posts tagged ‘The Kill Team’

There was a story that I wrote for the latest article I submitted to the paper. It examined a topic that I actually think is pretty serious. The typical American is told when they are born that the police officer and the soldier are your friends and that you should trust them. They are told that they are the people who protect you in times of trouble. This is a lesson that everybody is given, and that people are seeming to agree with blindly. Part of the problem these days is that people don’t want to be critical of law-enforcement personnel and soldiers. But that is something people should be critical of, and there are some very good reasons why.

A few weeks back, in Miami Beach, Florida, a man named Narces Benoit was out with his girlfriend. He got to see a rather awful event unfold in front of him. Nine cops were firing with abandon at Raymond Harisse. He was sitting in his parked car. The evidence points to him not having shot back. The cops claim that there was a gun hidden in his car. If that is the case, how would have have been able to shoot at the cops, get hit numerous times, and have hidden the gun? There is a logical disconnect happening with their story.

These nine cops, if they were firing a standard-issue Glock 22, potentially fired 135 rounds. One bystander reported that their guns were clicking on empty. That’s 135 rounds that not only went in Harisse, but also into four bystanders are the scene. These cops killed this man in cold blood, and why? Because he had run over a police officer earlier that day. Instead of taking him to jail, these cops decided to outright murder this man.

The police are a unique thing to watch right now. Here is an interesting practice that happens in this country – the cops will take people’s stuff and sell it. For real, this isn’t a joke. To make up for the unbelievably low wages this country forces our cops to accept, they have started routinely taking people’s stuff without even charging them for a crime. They take people’s stuff who aren’t able or who don’t have to money to fight for what is taken. They typically target low-income persons with a couple of charges under their bealt, so they won’t choose to fight. This is a fairly common practice among police officers in this country.

And brutality isn’t really just an every once in a while occurence either. A young black man in Houston, Texas was running from the cops. However, when his path was cut off, he got on the ground and put his hands behind his head in surrender. He has submitted, and the cops, instead of just handcuffing him and throwing him in the back of a car, they just, for 30 to 40 seconds, just beat him mercilessly.

And these are just some local examples. Then there is what American soldiers have been doing overseas. The biggest, and worst of these stories being one that appeared in an article in Rolling Stone magazine. It talked about a group of soldiers in Bravo Company that they dubbed “The Kill Team.” These guys not only killed, completely in cold blood, four Afghani civilians, but they were planning to kill more. Had they not have been stopped, the killing would have continued. One idea that they were throwing around was to go up to a bunch of kids and thrown candy out the windows of their vehicle. Then, when the kids came to grab it, they would open fire on them. But one of them thought – why waste the bullets? Why not just throw candy out in front of their vehicle and run them down?

These are American soldiers. These are people who are supposed to be able to respect the lives of others. And we have a group of men who killed and mutilated four people. One of them was from Wasilla, Alaska, the town I grew up in. There were pictures of them with severed heads. This is not the activities of a civilized society. And the sad fact is that all of the areas of law enforcement are becoming that way.

The TSA’s new pat-downs have been a source of controversy in this country for some time. But recently, it has taken an even uglier turn. The TSA told the daughter of a 95 year old leukemia patient to take off her soiled adult diaper. The elderly woman’s mother, was very stoic. The daughter bursted into tears. She had every reason to hate this. Not only is this not dignified, the fact that our government has given a branch of law enforcement the power to do something like this is just plain sick. That’s a fact – it’s sick. To even ask somebody to do this is wrong. The head of the TSA should have apologized, but they didn’t. What did they do? They said it didn’t happen. That was their response – to deny the allegation completely, and pretend it didn’t happen. And with the government pretty much giving them a blank ticket anymore, they can do that and it can work.

And of course, the great example of how the law can have unlimited power and can suffer no consequences – The Patriod Act. This is a hopelessly abused weapon of the system designed to keep an eye on the common man. Using it, they have been able to detain people for no reason, tap phones and enter homes without a warrant. They have even been able to torture people and have the military not be able to be prosecuted for this. It has been proven over and over that torture doesn’t work. A skilled interrogator who is good at reading people is worth more. But instead of following historical evidence, they decide to just keep at this broken system.

The big quesiton that needs to be asked – are we in danger from the law? The answer is looking more and more ugly. And what happens when this abuse happens to people? Who is made to pay for the violation of rights that is occuring? When a cop maces a 15 year old girl who he has pinned down on the hood of his car, with her hands cuffed behind her back, who gets retribution?

The problem is that so many people don’t allow these kinds of discussions to happen. They simply choose to say that the law is right, no matter what. Questioning if something is right is never a bad idea, never. People need to realize that, because if cops can shoot a man in cold blood and the complain about the media attacking them because it would hurt their case, who is being helped?